The Islamic Republic of Iran — whose regime has pledged to “wipe Israel off the map” and promised “the wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world” — began 2012 with a bang and a nuclear breakthrough, claiming to have successfully tested atomic technologies that experts say could one day yield a bomb.
The Persian Gulf nation has long contended that its nuclear program is a peaceful one, and that it’s enriching uranium only to provide fuel for its citizens — a measure approved by international law.
The problem is that enriched uranium is key to building a nuclear bomb, and Iran has conducted the controversial program largely in secret, stalling United Nations weapons inspectors who have struggled for 10 years and more to compile the report it finally released last November, which concludes that Iran has amassed enough sensitive material and expertise to build a bomb.
“Some of the activities have civilian as well as military applications, others are specific to nuclear weapons,” states the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran’s test-firing of two long-range missiles and its first domestically produced nuclear fuel rod in the Arabian Gulf last week come on the heels of yet another round of international sanctions against the mullah-run nation, which has flouted the curbing measures time and again.
“We do not give a damn to such resolutions,” President Ahmadinejad said back in 2006.
We should take him at his word.
There is nothing peaceful about Iran’s current rulers. They continue to top the U.S. State Department’s list of terror sponsors, they are mass murderers “with a long history of extrajudicial executions at the behest of the state, both inside Iran and abroad,” according to Amnesty International — and they fund terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
In Feb. 2008, this column reported on a speech that Ahmadinejad made a month earlier near the site of Iran’s first nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr, where he told the cheering crowd, “On the nuclear path, we are moving towards the peak.” At the time, Iran was faced with yet another round of international sanctions to which this column responded, “True to its nature, Iran will ignore them again because of its more pressing agenda: to manufacture atomic weapons in secrecy and without conscience, and use them to destroy the Free World.”
Ahmadinejad hatred for Judeo-Christian values is on public record: He called Israel a “filthy Zionist entity.” He dismissed 9-11 as “a big lie.” He shrugged off the Holocaust as a “myth.”
The defense funding bill approved by Congress last week to reduce Iran’s oil revenues — and the European Union’s agreement to boycott Iranian oil — are the toughest sanctions to date against Iran, but ultimately they are toothless tigers for a brazen, lawless regime which executes its own children.
Iran has shown the way of its heart, and proven its will to undermine the free world. Now, it is paving the way for the inevitable showdown.
Sabruzzo@cngocal.com
Read Shavana Abruzzo's column every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail her at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.
